CowCulator

Camila Nino Francia, Ananya Pragana, Bhavya Paleru, Aishwari Sirur, Adam Ye — University of California, Davis.

Coming into college, many of us were unaccustomed to having access to spend a greater amount of money. Tapping our phones on the ApplePay machine was easy enough, until we received disgruntled phone calls from our parents, advising us to budget our money more wisely. We wanted to design a platform for UC Davis students that were facing the same struggle as us, and provide a starting point for beginners to gain financial confidence. As a result, CowCulator was born.

Introduction

Our website, CowCulator, is a budgeting website primarily meant for college students who are just starting out with budgeting! The website lets users create an account and enter their monthly budget, the categories they want to set money to, and how much money they want to spend on each category. They can then easily see and update their spending to keep track of their money!

Our Team

Team: Camila Nino Francia, Ananya Pragana, Bhavya Paleru, Aishwari Sirur, Adam Ye

Tech Director: Shubhada Martha

Timeframe & Tools

The total backend development period is about 5 months, including many SWE sprint cycles. It was written in Node.js and Express.js framework. Some other tools and libraries were JWT, dcrypt2, and MongoDB.

Understanding the Problem

Many students who just get money struggle keeping track of how much they can spend and where to spend it. This can lead them to running out of money or not setting aside enough money for the important things.

Our Solution

We decided then to build a simple personal finance website aimed at helping track budgets and spending especially for college students. For onboarding, we have a basic setup process to enter your monthly budget categories and spending so far. Then, our website generates a customizable highly visual dashboard from which you can view your individual budgets and spending complete with pie charts and spending distributions.

Design Process

Once we thought about what kind of website we wanted to make, we first did our low-fi on paper, outlining our 3 main pages: sign up, dashboard, and a history page. We also drew out our cute cow mascot! Next, we moved on to prototyping our Mid-Fi in Figma with our complete user flows from either the sign in page or sign up page. After, we considered what color palette we wanted to do; we ended up choosing a soft green-themed palette with a standard font, Poppins. Then, we moved to transforming all our flows into High-Fi adding color, and adjusting sizes, and features as necessary.

Development Highlights

Some of the core features in our website include user authentication, so the users accounts are unique to them and allow them to keep their data safe. We also have multiple graphs so the users can easily visualize their spending. We also included Gemini AI recommendations on how to stay on top of their budget while in Davis! Users can easily add, edit, and delete categories to more efficiently track their spending. Some technical challenges we faced included connecting the backend and frontend sections, as they were developed independently, as well as working together when members were making developments on different branches. We overcame these challenges by having two meetings per week so we could constantly communicate with each other. We regularly explained our changes so everyone was up to date.

One of the initial highlights is developing JWT implementation before the midyear showcase. As my first time touching this topic, I spent some time exploring. And it worked pretty well.

Challenges & Lessons Learned

Throughout the development of CowCulator, our team faced a variety of challenges. Technically, one of the main hurdles was implementing user authentication and ensuring smooth communication between the frontend and backend. Debugging token-based authentication and managing protected routes taught us a lot about security and data flow in full-stack applications.

Collaboratively, we encountered a difficult situation when one team member consistently failed to contribute to the project. Despite our efforts to involve them, we ultimately had to make the tough decision to remove them from the team near the end. This taught us the importance of accountability and early communication in a team setting.

Time-wise, balancing development with academic responsibilities pushed us to manage our time efficiently and set realistic goals for each sprint. These challenges helped us become more adaptable, resilient, and better at working under pressure.

Next Steps & Future Work

Looking ahead, there are several features we’d love to expand on. One key improvement would be a dedicated Trends and Historical Statistics page where users can visualize trends in their spending and income. To support this, we plan to implement an income-tracking functionality, which could allow users to either manually input income or securely connect to their bank account activity via an API. Other future improvements include improved mobile responsiveness, and adding recommendations for different locations.

Shoutouts & Thanks

We want to thank the GDSC Explore Project coordinators for their support and guidance throughout the quarter. A special shoutout to Shubhada, our Tech Director and mentor, for her consistent support and for helping manage project organization — her advice was crucial in keeping us aligned and on schedule.

A big thank you as well to our teammates, Ananya, Bhavya, Aishwari, Adam, and Camilla, for staying committed and always showing up with new ideas and energy.

This project has been a meaningful experience — it gave us a chance to grow our skills, build something impactful, and understand the full lifecycle of a web app. We’re proud of what we’ve created and excited about how CowCulator can continue evolving.